SOURCE: "John Ruskin and the Character of Male Genius," in Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, University of North Carolina Press, 1990, pp. 117-29.

In the following essay, Dellamora explores Ruskin's changing views of sexuality as reflected in his writings about art history.

Thus far I have said little about John Ruskin, England's leading critic of the visual arts at midcentury and a presence unavoidable for a young man beginning a career as a critic of art in the 1860s. The following chapter considers the contribution that Ruskin made almost despite himself to the reflections on the character of artistic genius that culminate in Pater's essay of 1869 on Leonardo da Vinci. Pater's decision to present a self-consciously perverse model of aesthetic creativity in that essay brings to a coherent conclusion the debate that Ruskin wages with himself and others on the place of desire...